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This Is How You Lose Her
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This Is How You Lose Her
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This Is How You Lose Her
Audiobook5 hours

This Is How You Lose Her

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Junot Díaz burst into the literary world with Drown, a collection of indelible stories that revealed a major new writer with the "eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet" (Newsweek). His eagerly awaited first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, arrived like a thunderclap, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning a host of major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Now Díaz turns his prodigious talent to the haunting, impossible power of love.

The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts. They capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through - "the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying" - to try to mend what we've broken beyond repair. They recall the echoes that intimacy leaves behind, even where we thought we did not care. They teach us the catechism of affections: that the faithlessness of the fathers is visited upon the children; that what we do unto our exes is inevitably done in turn unto us; and that loving thy neighbor as thyself is a commandment more safely honored on platonic than erotic terms. Most of all, these stories remind us that the habit of passion always triumphs over experience, and that "love, when it hits us for real, has a half-life of forever."

Editor's Note

Pulsing with life…

A dazzling collection of stories about identity and relationships from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. As in “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, Díaz’s prose here is bawdy, colorful, and pulsing with life.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 11, 2012
ISBN9781101579428
Unavailable
This Is How You Lose Her

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Reviews for This Is How You Lose Her

Rating: 3.716819208810069 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was loving this but had too much on the go to finish and it was a library book. Will definitely read it later.

    Finally got back to it. I love Junot Diaz' writing, but prefer novels to short stories. Also, nagging in the back of my mind as I read this, were the criticisms I've read about Diaz and his attitude towards women (in his writing as well as off the page). How do you balance his brazenly sexist views with the fact that he is a Dominican man writing about his culture? Personally, I try to put my views on hold so I can enjoy what flows from his pen.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I decided to listen to this book since it was in the Goodreads Choice Awards. I think if it hadn't been on the list I probably wouldn't have listened to it. Had I been reading the printed version, I probably would have set it down right away. Not quiet my type of book.

    I will say he is a good writer and he puts a lot of emotion into reading the book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really enjoyed this book. Sometimes, from the small windows of opportunity given from the women, I was able to relate to them a bit, but overall, the book itself was very full of emotion and nicely written. There's a lot of themes going on all along - sexism, machismo, culture, etc., etc., so you tend to trip back and forth between wanting to finish or just keep going.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    After finally reading a book that has been on my "must read" list for several years, can someone please tell me what in God's name I'm missing? Many of the gushing reviews made Diaz's work sound like an instant contemporary classic. I can't tell you bored I was as I forced myself to muddle through the work before finally giving up three-quarters of the way into it. Nothing really came together for me. Still, I will admit that Diaz is an excellent writer who can masterfully capture an important thought or insight in a well-crafted sentence. His skills have spared this work from getting a rare one-star rating.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The stories contained some good dialog, and a good dose of character development. However, as a whole, the book wasn’t integrated or unified.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    3.5 stars -- I listened to the audio version, read by the author, and for the most part enjoyed it. Some parts were terribly sad, others laugh-out-loud funny, but I think what was most impressive was the author's ability to bring these characters to life in so few words. Many authors don't accomplish that in books that are ten times longer.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Truly great, well-written book, despite him being a horrid sexist who disrespects women.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A collection of short stories centered around a primary character from Diaz's Pulitzer winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. And true to form, some stories worked for me and some didn't. While these collection of stories can stand on their own, I recommend reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao first.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Just as good as everyone told you.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Terrible flat characters, women in every story are just lamentably bad constructed, there’s no evolution in a single story. Like every story is just void
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I adored Oscar Wao, and I liked most of these stories a lot when I read them in the New Yorker. But somehow, reading them all together (along with the few I hadn't seen elsewhere), Yunior & his behavior towards women got to be a little much for me. He just didn't endear himself to me as much as poor Oscar.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Well, I just read this book in a day. It's only 200 pages, but I don't do that very often.

    It gets five stars because it simply is amazing. And because I had ridiculously high expectations for this book and I was not even remotely disappointed.

    All of the little Dominicanisms, etc. in Diaz's writing always make me happy. Sometimes they make me smile, or even chuckle (embarrassing when you remember that you are on the couch at one of your favorite cafes, not in your living room). I'll always remember the phrase "colmado superstar", which he used in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. gave me quality words like "berserkeria". And all of the references to Dominican culture and history, many I am familiar with (Juan Bosch! And one of the characters is from Moca! I LIVED in Moca!) always make me smile, make me rediscover something inside me, this passion that I sometimes forget about. I can't really credit Junot Diaz with that, but I can credit him with doing such an excellent job of weaving all of these Dominicanisms into the Americanisms and the general story. Nothing is superfluous in his books - my all-time pet peeve in writing, which for me is a problem in so many contemporary novels.

    His writing is just amazing. I had to stop and write down so many quotes in my little pocket notebook. I know from all of the things that have been written about Diaz, that writing is hard work for him. But you would not know it from his writing; it seems effortless, and if you aren't paying attention you will read over sentences as if they are common and casual, without realizing that they are actually highly unique. That is, I think, why his writing works. He doesnt write stories peppered with beautiful sentences. Anyone with a little discipline can do that. Diaz writes stories that have incredible descriptive power, with sentences that also happen to be beautiful. But then there are also many, many sentences that are just real. (I'm kicking myself for not having written it down, and now I can't find it, but in one sentence he uses the word "conducted" in such a way that I didn't notice it, then did a double-take and was amazed with the originality of the sentence, which created such a specific and precise image.)

    Long story short, this is a book about love but it is a book about so much more than that. It is about biculturalism and it is about aging and it is about father issues and mother issues and sibling issues and immigrant issues. It is about the minefield that is dating and it is about all of the ways people can hurt each other and all of the chances they have to forgive and to apologize, all the little things that would be so simple for them to do but that really are the most difficult thing in the world.

    Also, it has baseball in it, so what's not to love?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enjoyed it immensely. The short story style with certain characters running through it made it good for the long read or the intermittent reader. The strong point was the beautiful diction and syntax. While still maintaining realness.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very similar to 'Drown'--the last chapter--seemingly autobiographical takes place in Cambridge and felt so, so uncomfortably close to home that I loved it all the more.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I received an ARC for this book through goodreads. I picked it up a few times but really couldn't bring myself to finish it. I didn't enjoy the narrator and often was confused by the references to things in Spanish. When I'm reading a book I like the character to grow and learn but the narrator acted like a jerk most of the time and never seemed to change. I understand that this is true of many people, but I enjoy reading as an escape not as a sad reminder of the reality of life.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This was a real disapointment to me; I had been looking forward to reading this for quite some time. It's a collection of stories, which generally turns me off, but for the most part it worked because they were really all about one character and in the end, there's a full, cohesive story. That is, except for that one chapter that I'm still puzzling over - I have no idea who the narrator was or what the connection with the other short stories was. On top of that, the switch from "I" to "you" which still referred to the narrator was confusing and difficult to get past. In the end, the biggest problem I had with this book was that I didn't like or feel sorry for the narrator. He was with "the love of his life," his fiancee, for six years, and cheated on her with 50 different women, from the beginning of their relationship. Seriously? What was to like about him? Or care whether or not he ever got over her? In my opinion, he could have been heartbroken for the rest of his life and I would have just thought he got what he deserved. He did acknowledge that in the end, but it wasn't enough for me to feel sympathy for him.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I loved Diaz's Oscar Wao novel, so I was looking forward to this one. Too bad it doesn't have anywhere near the depth of the earlier work.

    I will say that the writing remains wonderful--powerful, evocative, and provocative. Diaz wields language as a weapon and doesn't pull any punches. That's the good news.

    And now for the not-so-good. As others have commented, most of the women in this series of stories are ciphers--they're there only for Yunior to take from or (grudgingly) give to. None of the characters are sympathetic, either, which makes it hard to relate to or root for them.

    These stories aren't told in chronological order, making the narrative arc a bit scattered. More important, Yunior doesn't appear to learn anything or grow from his dealings with women over the book's course. Why bother telling his story if he ends up thinking of women the same way as in the beginning? Disappointing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have this theory, every producer (be it a band, writer ...) in the entertainment business reaches its best with their first or second product, after that their particular formula grows stale. Sometimes they realize this and the change styles but it's no longer the same.With Mr. Diaz I guess is the first case, he keeps on using the same formula. His trademark Spanglish, with the uber-high English and the street Spanish, the colorful Dominican Republic inserts and the darks of immigrant life. And that formula no longer works, at least for this reader.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    HoHum
    Read it less than 2 weeks ago and it's already nearly disappeared from my mind.
    May be "excellent" literature/writing, but personally, just not my style and didn't do anything for me.
    Humans are the same across all nationalities, yet the Dominican setting & machismo wasn't something I could seem to relate to and some of scenes are a stretch for any culture.
    I'll read more by this author, because he writes well, but if they follow this same theme, won't be inclined to finish another.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Junot Diaz's book This is How You Lose Her recounts the dysfunctional love life of Yunior. Diaz portrays Yunior as a stereo-typical hispanic male with all the machismo of his fore fathers flowing through his veins. Like his Dad and brother, he is a womanizer.In my book club I found the women had a difficult time dealing with Yunior's ways. Some found him and his cavalier attitude toward love, reprehensible. Honestly, he didn't bother me. Oh sure he was pathetic and when he screwed up his relationships, which he inevitably did, he moped around like a love sick puppy, pounding on his chest and sobbing oh woes me. Yeah, bring out the violins. Yunior knows he is wrong and he is devastated when busted. At the end of one relationship he slips into a deep depression and you say to yourself, well Yunior you knew this could happen so you shouldn't be surprised. Yet, he continues his wandering ways. Unfortunately Diaz makes this story one dimensional, solely focusing on Yunior's womanizing and not delving into the deeper and darker psychological aspect of this destructive behavior. Was it because he wasn't his mother's favorite? Was his dad that much of an influence on him? Why does Yunior not seem to learn from his mistakes?A raw, earthy use of language is used to tell this story. Yunior, his brother Rafa and his mother are the protagonist with several women thrown in. The women are flat in character but then again it's not their story....it's all about Yunior.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The man is wild, hilarious, taboo breaking and non-stop in his delivery.While not all these stories are of the same caliber, the sum is greater than its parts. Diaz is inventive, his Yunior and Rafa are a couple of maniacs who tear through relationships, one after the other, while their mother stands by with passive acceptance.This book of stories is not on a par with his masterpiece, Oscar Wao, but it is a fun read.Diaz has a great ear, his dialogue is natural, flowing with total ease. I wonder if his writing is more agreeable to male readers. It would be interesting to see how his ratings break down on a gender basis. I give him a solid 4 out of 5 stars.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Genius. Diaz writes like no one I have ever read and tells stories no one else has told me. What he does with language is like an endless dazzling party trick. I will sometimes get to the end of a particularly amazing paragraph and find myself praising him aloud. Freaking beautiful. Yunior, whom I met in "Drown" and got to know a little better in "Oscar Wao" is front and center here. He is much smarter than I thought, and more observant, and still entirely led by his dick. Dominican men who are not dogs should sue for slander. Read this, but read "Oscar Wao" first. If you are like me, you will find your perception of the world changed and your assumptions about how dynamic language can be widened.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read this book while I was taking the bar exam. It has an overall feeling of sadness, of losing something. Often, the feel of a book can really change my mood, but Junot Diaz is a fantastic writer and there is an easy way you slip into his characters without feeling dragged down. I enjoyed it more than Oscar Wao and it was an easy read. It's set up more like a short story format than a traditional novel.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Just as everyone who loves this book says, the writing in this work is really quite good. It's an interesting mix of Dominican slang and English and helps to contribute to the rawness of the narration. However, the characters were all flat, Yunior was pretty much unreadable as a somewhat main character, and nobody ever learned anything from the mistakes they made.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enjoyed this very much; loved all the relationships, enjoyed all the characters. My favorite story was "The Pura Principle." I'll have to think about how he did it: got at the tremendous sadness of what was happening without any trace of sentimentality, with real feeling, and also the sense of a particular, individual tragedy. The narrator, his brother, his mother, Pura. All of them really vivid.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Next time I hear about dominicans in the U.S. this book will come to my mind. Those relationship stories are just the tip of an iceberg, that let us have a glimpse to the dominican soul, its assumptions and understanding about how life should be. Nicely written in a very honest true-to-life style.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Good set of short stories that blend to form a narrative of immigrant life on East coast. Easy beach read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The intermission Latino music is so close to redeeming this audiobook. Junot took a while to warm up his reading voice and it was rough in spots, but my inner narrator voice doesn't sound so pretty saying the Spanish parts.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I know this book was released to much critical acclaim and the author is wildly popular so it was a no brainer that I would eventually have to read this book. I read a review somewhere that the audiobook was amazing and narrated by the author so I decided to give it a go. I am soo glad that I did. I didn't bother reading the description, I just figured I'd plunge in and figure out the contents as I listened. The book follows Yunior and the romances, break ups, aand heartbreak that surround him, his fmily, and his friends Filled with cheating, lies, true love, and family drama the stories all weave together, told in slang, Spanish, and brute honesty. Author, Junot Diaz's narration of his wonderfully crafted story is perfect. I think one of the main reasons I enjoyed this book soo much is because he brought it to life with the lyrical quality of his voice and prose. I also would have butchered the Spanish and the names had I read it to myself. Although not "uplifting" it is an explorative look into factors that can end a relationship and is a must read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book was well written, but it's depiction of the Dominican immigrant experience and the way the men treated the women in this book left me feeling sad.